Warp It: rebuilding the reuse platform

Warp It has been helping organisations give their unwanted furniture and equipment to each other since 2011. A university clearing an office lists the desks; a hospital department down the road claims them; nobody buys new, and nothing goes in a skip. By Warp It's own count, the network has avoided over £46 million in purchasing and kept more than 9,000 tonnes out of landfill.

This year we rebuilt the platform it runs on.

What Warp It needed

A platform that had grown over fifteen years, with more than 1,500 organisations on it, many of them NHS trusts, universities and councils with their own IT rules, and portals in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA and Spain. The rebuild had to move everyone across without losing their history, and then keep improving while they used it.

What we built

The new platform, and everyone's data moved onto it. Since then, in the last few weeks alone:

• Single sign-on, so staff at universities and trusts sign in with their own work account, the way they sign into everything else at work
• A photo does the typing. List an item and the form fills itself in from the picture; the person checks it and posts it
• A reuse calculator on the website: pick your type of organisation and size, and see what organisations like yours typically save, from real Warp It figures
• Each country's portal in its own currency, rather than pounds everywhere
• A watch list, so people looking for something are told when it turns up, and not before it can actually be claimed
• A "My activity" page, so everyone can see what they've given and claimed
• carbon savings worked out the way Warp It's own customers report them, from the government's published conversion factors

Why it matters

Reuse only works if it's less effort than ordering something new. Every one of these takes a step out: one fewer password, one fewer form to fill in, one fewer email to ask whether the thing's still there.

Software for businesses, not just websites

Warp It is a business that runs on its software. If yours does too, and it's grown the way old software grows, get in touch.

Warp It · Try the reuse calculator